America's Appetite for Watching People Die: How Livestreaming a Firing Squad is The Perfect Illustration of Late-Stage Capitalism

In the terminal phase of imperial decline, a society’s cultural superstructure undergoes a distinct shift toward ghastly, commodified violence. As the contradictions of late-stage capitalism intensify—characterized by widening class polarization, imperialist aggression abroad, and eroding democratic legitimacy at home—the ruling class increasingly resorts to spectacle to maintain control. Nothing illustrates this grotesque evolution more clearly than the Pentagon’s proposal under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to carry out the execution of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan via a military firing squad, accompanied by plans to livestream the killing to the public.

Hasan, convicted for the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, has been on military death row for years. Yet, the sudden urgency to revive execution by firing squad—a method unused by the U.S. military since 1945—and broadcast it digitally across global networks transforms a judicial sentence into a violent reality-TV broadcast. It reflects a society whose ruling elites are seeking to condition the public to accept raw state violence, bloodlust, and imperial punishment as routine consumption.

The Spectacle of Violence and the Capitalist State

Capitalism in its decay relies heavily on what Guy Debord termed the "society of the spectacle"—a state where authentic human experience is replaced by commodified images. When state-sanctioned execution is stripped of its legalistic secrecy and placed onto a high-definition livestream, it serves a dual purpose for the capitalist state: it terrorizes the population while satisfying a cultivated appetite for voyeuristic cruelty.

As analyzed by the World Socialist Web Site, the push toward public execution by firing squad is not a mere quirk of policy or an isolated display of reactionary zeal. It represents a descent into fascist barbarism. The WSWS points out that as the American capitalist state faces unprecedented crises—deepening economic stagnation, growing domestic class discontent, and escalating military conflicts across the globe—the ruling class turns to macabre public rituals to project power and terrorize both domestic political opposition and foreign adversaries.

This is the ultimate expression of state violence as entertainment: turning the industrial execution of a human being into content designed to feed the morbid instincts cultivated by a militarized culture.

Defense Tech, Capital, and the Business of Death

The proposal to stream a military firing squad cannot be detached from the political economy of modern American warfare. Reporting from Mother Jones exposes the cozy, insidious ties between Defense Department leadership, political ideologues like Hegseth, and Silicon Valley defense contractors such as Palantir and Anduril. In an era where tech oligarchs build autonomous drone networks and AI-driven surveillance platforms for empire, the line between military execution, corporate profit, and digital media has effectively vanished.

Mother Jones highlights how the rhetoric surrounding "lethality" and public execution aligns seamlessly with the culture of defense-tech firms, where killing power is celebrated as a high-margin product. When state execution becomes a televised event, it serves as an advertisement for the machinery of military tech and the raw authority of the war apparatus.

Commenting on these horrifying proposals, independent media creators from Due Dissidence cut straight through the establishment double-speak, describing Hegseth's vision as a "psychotic public execution plan." They observed how mainstream figures and Hegseth’s colleagues "struggle to justify" a maneuver that belongs more appropriately in a dystopian military dictatorship than a self-proclaimed constitutional republic. Due Dissidence noted that the impulse to broadcast a firing squad is the natural endgame of a political system that treats human life as cheap and political power as a theatrical display of cruelty.

Political Friction and the Retraction of the Broadcast

The sheer extremity of the plan triggered panic within establishment corridors. As reported by CBS News, senior Trump administration officials eventually began leaning away from carrying out a public livestream of Hasan’s execution. This internal retreat was not driven by sudden moral enlightenment, but rather by legal hurdles, institutional anxiety within the Pentagon, and fear of massive public backlash.

However, as Politico noted in its coverage of the bipartisan friction surrounding Hegseth, the fact that such a proposal was seriously drafted, circulated, and defended at the highest levels of the U.S. government marks a dangerous threshold crossed. Politico detailed how lawmakers and civil rights organizations were forced to react to a reality where public executions were being actively debated as viable government policy, exposing how far the Overton window has shifted toward open authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, The Guardian emphasized the global shock and outrage generated by the prospect of a U.S. military firing squad being broadcast across digital platforms. The Guardian underscored that carrying out a firing squad execution—and attempting to broadcast it—violates international norms against cruel and degrading punishment, further isolating the U.S. on the world stage while revealing the sheer brutality hiding behind the rhetoric of "law and order."

Settler Imperialism and the Desensitization of the Core

Why does late-stage capitalism demand a public appetite for watching people die? Because an empire engaged in perpetual colonial war abroad must constantly desensitize its domestic population to the horrors it inflicts globally. From the genocide in Gaza funded by U.S. tax dollars to drone strikes across the Global South, the imperial core requires a populace accustomed to blood.

When the state offers its citizens the televised execution of a bound man by a military firing squad, it is training the working class to view violent state power not as an atrocity to be overthrown, but as a spectator sport to be consumed. The public livestream is the imperial amphitheater updated for the digital age—a digital Coliseum designed to distract from declining living standards, crumbling infrastructure, and systemic exploitation.

Socialist Resistance Against Barbarism

The proposal to livestream a military execution is a warning sign of what late-stage capitalism has in store for humanity if left unchecked. When the ruling class can no longer offer social progress, healthcare, living wages, or peace, it offers state terror, military spectacles, and televised death.

As socialists, anti-imperialists, anti-zionists, and anti-capitalists, our response must extend beyond mere moral disgust. We must recognize that the firing squad and the livestream screen are products of the same capitalist state that enforces colonial occupation abroad and class exploitation at home. The struggle against state barbarism is inseparable from the struggle to dismantle the military-industrial complex, overthrow the capitalist ruling class, and build a world rooted in human dignity, solidarity, and liberation.